Who Owns the Social Graph?

One of the big stories in the tech world this week was a showdown between controversial blogger Robert Scoble and Facebook.  You can read this article to get a fairly balanced recap of the drama, or browse through Blogrunner’s aggregation of posts and articles.  (On a side note, I just discovered Blogrunner and it may be the coolest thing I’ve found all week).

But the gist is this: Scoble was alpha testing a program being developed by Plaxo (a forerunner of social networks as we know them today) called Plaxo Pulse.  The particular feature he was testing was a script which logged onto his Facebook account, and then rapidly browsed through his friends, profile-by-profile, collecting — or, “scraping” — their names, birthdays, and e-mail addresses.  (For more on scraping, see this recent article in Wired).  This data was to be imported into Plaxo to help populate a user’s address book there.  Facebook picked up on the superhuman speed at which the profiles were being accessed, and promptly deactivated Scoble’s account while notifying him he had violated Facebook’s Terms of Use.

Most of the heavyweights have weighed in on the matter: Arrington, Battelle, Carr, Fake Steve, Hansell, O’Hear, and of course Scoble himself has a few things to say.  And they’re not all singing the same tune.

John Battelle breaks it down:

As the debate deepens, it seems there are two camps – first, the camp that says Facebook has either A. a right and/or B. an economic necessity to create a walled garden for our data. The second camp argues that Facebook – and any other walled garden – is A. Stupid or B. Greedy or C. Both.

Battelle goes on to argue that framing the debate in this way misses the real point, and I agree.  IMHO, the real question is not whether or not users own their information and should be able to take it with them.  I believe that they do, and they should.  Facebook does not own our information, they just help us organize it and make it useful.  What Facebook owns is the means by which they organize the information (algorithms), the ways they structure their data (friends, groups, networks), and the ways they present it to the users (profiles, news feed).  Their competitive advantage is not the information they store, but the services they provide around and through that information.  And like Battelle, I believe that Facebook will recognize this and give users an easy way to export the social graph.

Some have attempted to frame this as a privacy debate, as well.  Should my Facebook friends be able to export key information that I’ve shared with them on the service for use in other applications?  Carr says it another way:

Now, if you happen to be one of those “friends,” would you think of your name, email address, and birthday as being “Scoble’s data” or as being “my data.” If you’re smart, you’ll think of it as being “my data,” and you’ll be very nervous about the ability of someone to easily suck it out of Facebook’s database and move it into another database without your knowledge or permission. After all, if someone has your name, email address, and birthday, they pretty much have your identity – not just your online identity, but your real-world identity.

At first I was in total agreement with this.  But you have to take a step back sometimes, and think of relationships outside of the Internet.  Sharing information with someone, regardless of the context, is licensing them with the right to keep that information for their personal use.  Essentially, you’re handing them your business card.  Taking information out of Facebook and putting it elsewhere is like putting that business card in your Rolodex, or typing the information on that card into your online address book.  You give someone that information to make it useful, not for it to be holed up and of little-to-no value to your friend.

But in the same spirit, I don’t think Scoble and Plaxo’s actions are excusable.  Facebook may have our information under lock and key right now, but that doesn’t give anyone the right to try and break in.  The method that Scoble used to export his information was the same method a hacker or spammer would use to seize information and use it for nefarious or commercial purposes.  That’s why Facebook doesn’t show e-mail addresses as text, but rather as pictures.

The onus is on Facebook to open up and give users a safe, secure way to export their information.  It is neither the duty nor the right of users or other companies to breach the Terms of Use and attempt to gather that information themselves.  I am especially shocked that Plaxo unabashedly proceeded with the development of this feature when it knew the service would violate Facebook’s Terms of Use.  Like Arrington said in his post, that just goes against common sense.

Image used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user luc.